


Jasmine and Salt

by moodiful819



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-13 04:17:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3367508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodiful819/pseuds/moodiful819
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kakashi doesn’t remember having a childhood growing up. He wishes it stayed that way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Jasmine and Salt

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to sunblaze24 on tumblr for making me sad.

Kakashi had never been young. He did not understand it when his colleagues complained about wanting to reclaim their youth. Being born into a clan meant being born into traditions older than yourself, and accordingly he had been molded into a container befitting such staid practices.

His earliest memories were filled with images of himself wrapped in musty kimonos and the thick smell of preserving mothballs as the heirloom fabrics swallowed him in their folds. Combined with his grey hair and quiet demeanor, the lone servant of the house lovingly referred to him as an old soul; an old man trapped in a young boy’s body. If he’d ever had a childhood, he didn’t remember it, and after the war started, it certainly no longer existed.

Keeping his head down, the next few years passed in a blur. In what felt like the blink of an eye, he found himself surrounded by children yet again, except now he was 26, towered where he had been tiny, and smelled more like takeout than mothballs. 

It was something he kept track of, smells. Though his nose was nowhere as sensitive as the Inuzuka clan’s, he was attuned to scents and kept a personal catologue when he had the mind for it. He hadn’t even noticed he had been doing it until he was 15, but it had proved handy over the years in locating bombs and poisons, so he continued. Nearly two decades after he’d started, he had quite the collection.

So it didn’t startle him when he smelled blood that day on the bridge. After years in this line of work, it could no longer surprise him. Rather, it gave him a morbid sense of home, and he savoured it in a small pocket of himself along with all the other mundane, vaguely familiar scents that day: the damp, faintly tinny scent of the fog, the acrid curl of singed hair, even the faint smell of sea salt that belied Zabuza’s sweat—a distinctive soap ingredient in this area…

But touch. That was different.

As the smell of burnt, curdling flesh reached his nose…as the sensation of cartilage and bone shattered and curled around his arm, the scent of copper and chamomile knocked him back and suddenly, he felt himself falling back into himself. As he fell, a dim part of his brain recalled that scent was strongly linked to memory, and that he felt like he’d done this before…

When he placed the memory at last, he found himself twelve again, blood-smeared, crying, and elbow-deep in the chest of his teammate. Rin was choking out her last words, but all Kakashi could focus on was the rapidly-defining recollection that Rin used floral soaps when she bathed and always smelled faintly of jasmine. 

The image had only been for a second—Haku’s face quickly eclipsed the gut-churning image of Rin once more—but the damage had been done. The scent of jasmine was lodged firmly in his mind, along with all its horror and guilt.

When the fight was finally over, he stood over the corpse of the young boy. Eyes shut, a peaceful expression as if he was merely asleep, he had nothing like the pained look of surprise Rin had when she died. They looked nothing alike, but her image continued to flicker over his body, halting and wavering like a damaged strip of film. It unnerved him feeling like this. He had never wanted to feel young again, but here he was standing over an echo of his past.

Slowly, the present reached back for him: the dampness of his clothes, the sting of his wounds. Lumps of cauterized flesh and blood weighted his sleeve, and he fought against the urge to shudder. As he did, the scent of jasmine continued to fill his sinuses, wandering his brain like a specter, leaving him feeling small, jagged, and once again, very much alone.


End file.
